Comic Book Day: Pull List for June 25, 2014

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Do you have too much money in your wallet? It certainly seems that way, Uncle Pennybags. I’ll bet you were about to take a dive into your cavernous vault-pool of gold doubloons, weren’t you, Scrooge McDuck? Well, far be it from me to tell you Richie Rich one-percenter types how to spend your hard-earned cash, but how about some comics? Eh? Nice, hot, juicy comics fresh off the presses? Sounds pretty good, huh? Well, you’re right about that at least, and this week’s Pull List is absolutely bursting with ways to send your finances deep into the red. But, then again, it wouldn’t be Comic Book Day if that weren’t the case and we wouldn’t have it any other way.

After tearing my way through Tim Daniel and Michael Moreci’s excellent BOOM! Studios mini-series Curse, I was eager to get my hands on anything else the writers had done. Fortunately, I was able to get an early sneak peek at Michael Moreci’s Roche Limit, but what about Daniel? We next crossed paths when Machinima tapped director BenDavid Grabinski to make an excellent web series version of Daniel’s kaiju comic book Enormous, which finds humanity desperately trying to stave off massive food shortages and environmental crises when suddenly massive creatures, the titular Enormous, emerge and start reorganizing the food chain. What follows is a delightful piece of apocalyptica mixed with incredible creature design and compelling characters. Yet, how does the comic book stack up? The original debuted as a 64-page one-shot from Image Comics, but now 215 Ink is teaming up with Daniel and artist Mehdi Cheggour to publish the comic as it was originally intended, an expanded, serialized story. The result is nothing short of breathtaking.

It’s odd that after a year dominated by memories of Guillermo Del Toro’s Pacific Rimand the gargantuan marketing blitz around Gareth Edwards’ Godzillathat Enormous can still manage to feel so fresh in a media landscape suddenly dominated by colossal creatures. Still, Enormous #1 is, at the risk of sounding cliché, a bona fide page-turner. Much like an Anchorman newsroom fight, the comic escalates quickly, introducing a creeping, seemingly extradimensional biological horror that lures humans to it like a will o’ the wisp before turning them into a lifeless husk, a host body for its insidious parasites. Just as soon as we’ve had a chance to process this iridescent terror, we get our first taste of the mayhem that’s about to unfold as a creature erupts from the water in a blur of sound and fury, politicians talk in hushed tones about disaster prevention, and fighter jets unleash salvos on unsuspecting cities while citizens look on in horror. Our hero, Ellen, is about as instantly likable and bad ass as they come, which makes her journey one we actually care about, and Cheggour’s intensely cinematic art style blends photorealism with a painterly style to create visually stunning panels. Throw in the fact that it’s a whopping 48 pages and there’s little doubt that Enormous lives up to its name, especially in terms of sheer entertainment value. Highly recommended.

If you’re going to have a tribute to classic E.C. Comics era artist Jack Davis, you could do a lot worse than Eric Powell. Powell dedicated this free-wheeling one-shot to the Mad/Tales from the Crypt/The Vault of Horror cartoonist, offering the issue “with all respect and admiration” to Davis.

The heart is definitely there, even if One for the Road doesn’t quite meet the high bar of other Goon done-in-one’s like Satan’s Sodomy Baby. In fact, it’s the book’s heart that makes it feel like a slightly jarring turn from the normal stories’ collection of gypsy curses, mildly sinister orphans, and portents of doom (even if all of those things are actually in the book).

The title, appropriately enough, ties into a night-long bar crawl involving Frankie, Goon, and a sailor on leave trying to find his lost buddy. The hapless sailor – dubbed “Georgia” by Frankie – knows his buddy Harvey is probably tying one on at a local bar, and he’s determined to collect him before they both end up in the brig for going AWOL. And so begins a night of drifting from bar to bar, looking for Harvey, allowing Powell to set up short, one and two-page gags involving some of the bog people and miscreants who frequent the book normally.

The format also offers Powell the chance to lightly homage Davis’ work, complete with a trio of witches offering some foul advice to wayward youth to a collection of celebrity caricatures, ending in the inevitable carnivorous Nazi gorilla attack because when it’s Eric Powell, of course there’s going to be an atomic gorilla.

Powell doesn’t veer off into the harder absurdity or grotesqueness that you’d typically find in one of his books, almost as though he was trying to create something that wouldn’t shock Davis into a premature retirement. Flashes of his normal, darkly funny self slash through, though, such as the quick Predator gag and the line about orphanages.

If nothing pick up One for the Road for the excellent art and enjoy this rare light touch from Eric Powell.

It’s fair to say there is a lot riding on Superman #32, which is serving as a mini-relaunch of the character for DC. Since the New 52 initiative started back in 2011, it is perhaps the Man of Steel who has suffered the most slings and arrows critically and commercially; Batman has the dream team of Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo, Wonder Woman has received tons of critical acclaim under Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang, but despite launching with Grant Morrison in Action Comics, this newer version of Superman just never really caught on. Outside of the Scott Snyder/Jim Lee Superman: Unchained title, Superman’s sales have been middling at best. Morrison decided to go back to Kal-El’s 1930’s roots by making him more of an urban crusader for social change, and in doing so removed a lot of the more Silver Age elements that Geoff Johns worked back into the Superman mythology just a few short years prior to the reboot. Sadly, a lot of those elements are some of the things that make Superman the most fun.

There is a sense of “let’s get back to basics” with this issue of Superman. One of the more wrong-headed moves has had to be removing Clark Kent from the Daily Planet to make him a “blogger” of some sort. Geoff Johns realizes that Superman and the Daily Planet go hand in hand, and in this first issue has Perry White persuade Clark to return home. Perry says to Clark “everyone needs someone to talk to Kent”, not so subtly inferring that the Daily Planet staff really existed to give Superman a group of people to care about and connect with, and taking Clark away from them was a dumb idea. With both Jonathan and Martha Kent dead in the new continuity (not something I’m a fan of), Superman needs people in his life to care about more than ever, and not just other super-people. It’ll be interesting to see what other classic Superman elements Johns attempts to sneak back into the mythology.

Of course, even more than the return of Geoff Johns to Superman, the real big to-do about issue #32 is the arrival of John Romita Jr. not only to Superman, but to DC Comics, period. In many ways, John Romita Jr. IS Marvel Comics, and has been for the better part of three decades. To have him leave Marvel to work on their number one rival’s number one character is something of a big deal. So does Romita deliver the goods? For the most, he does. Romita is particularly good at drawing huge, barrel chested heroes like Thor, Cap, and the Thing at Marvel, and was lest convincing drawing characters like Spider-Man, in my opinion. Well, who is brawnier and chestier than Superman? So in the big flying and fighting scenes, Romita pulls all that off fairly spectacularly. I still hate all the damn piping and whatnot in Superman’s costume, and you can tell Romita hates it too, because in some panels you see he barely bothers drawing them. But aside from that detail, his Superman looks how Superman should. And he looks especially awesome punching a giant robot gorilla. (Less so wearing a backwards baseball cap. Let’s not have Clark get all frat-bro on us please.)

As for the story this issue, Johns and Romita use the opening prologue to set up what seems to be another addition (possibly a villain) to Superman‘s cast. The first five pages introduce us to scientists Peter and Bridget, a married couple working in the remote and mysterious Ulysses Labs some twenty-five years ago. The facility’s main focus seems to be on opening rifts and exploring other dimensions, and when an accident causes the lab to initiate self destruct, the scientists send their infant son in a capsule into another dimension where he will grow up with powers, thinking he is the only survivor of his doomed planet. (Although, why did these scientists have their infant boy with them at work when the accident happened? Was it “bring your child to my top secret underground facility job” day? Maybe best not to ask these questions.) Of course, he shows up as an adult in the climax of the issue, arriving on Earth, giving Supes a hand and seemingly a good guy, but who’s to say he’ll remain friendly? Some of Superman’s most memorable villains have been darker versions of himself-Bizarro, the zombie Superman, Ultraman and Cyborg, both the “evil” Superman… is there room for one more? Or what if he really is a good guy? These questions are enough to get me to stick around and see what happens next. If anyone can get Superman working again, Geoff Johns and John Romita Jr. are as safe a bet as you can make.